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Amazing Fact- Floating Forest- Home Bush Bay

Over the century after it was first launched, the British-built steamship, the SS Ayrfield, hosted a variety of different sailors and cargo. During World War II, it was used by the Australian government to transport food and supplies to soldiers in the Pacific theatre, and afterwards, sold to a shipping company to transport coal.

But although the vessel was wrecked and decommissioned in the early 1970s, left to rust in Sydney's Homebush Bay, it has since been slowly commandeered by a new type of crew: a floating forest of lush mangroves.

As imposing as it must have seemed when rolling off the shipyard line in 1911, a steel-hulled testament to human ingenuity, after decades of service the SS Ayrfield, like many of our formerly-prized possessions, became mired in obsolescence. Though in the years that followed, that wrecked old coal ship has come to represent something else entirely -- the ease with which nature can reclaim even the stateliest symbols of our civilization.